The L.E.A.F. Initiative is a Commonwell program to support capacity, resiliency and growth in the communities we call home.

Loving Spoonful’s Community Harvest Food Forest

263 Weller Ave, Unit 4 KingstonK7K 2V4

Target Completion Date: May 31, 2024

What is this project about?

Community Harvest Kingston (CHK), founded in 2008, originally a grassroots community initiative to bring fresh produce to Rideau Heights (a low-income) neighbourhood, became formalized as a program of Loving Spoonful in 2022.

Loving Spoonful connects people with good food and community across Kingston & Area. Working toward a healthier, more connected community, we provide programs and champion policies affecting food security, poverty, social inclusion, and community health. As a registered charity, we provide programs within four main areas related to local food systems: Local Food Access, Urban Agriculture, Community Kitchens, and the GROW Project (a school-based program). Community Harvest is one project within our Urban Agriculture program.

Community Harvest’s focus is on supporting and celebrating biodiversity and ecologically-friendly farm management practices, as well as social-based practices, offering direct relationships with eaters through our markets and hands-on work days in the gardens.

Community Harvest runs three collective urban agriculture sites throughout Kingston. Our volunteers, community members, and staff work together to plant, cultivate, and harvest a wonderful variety of delicious vegetables – in 2022, we grew more than 70 crops.

Our produce is distributed through three channels:

1) Community Harvest Markets: these “mini farmers’ markets” ensure dignified, low-cost access to local food in targeted locations to best serve food insecure community members. All items on the table are $0-5, and market attendees are welcome to pay what they can within that sliding scale. Everyone is welcome to attend our markets.

2) Loving Spoonful’s Local Food Stands: produce stands located within various social services agencies throughout Kingston: anyone who needs the produce is welcome to take it from the stand, at no cost and with no questions asked.

3) Loving Spoonful’s Community Kitchens programs: Community Kitchens participants take home a basket of veggies each week, and learn how to use different seasonal produce items in cooking workshops.

We also engage with eaters by designing days that community members can help in the gardens with hands-on work. The collective gardens we operate are sites of agro-ecological (working with ecological systems in our agricultural approaches) knowledge and skill-sharing, neighbourhood revitalization, and social engagement. We welcome visitors and groups to participate in work days and tours.

In 2023, we plan to add a fourth urban agriculture site under Community Harvest. We will design and plant a food forest, a project that, when the plants mature, would allow us to better serve our community by offering additional types of foods (on top of the vegetables we produce), adding fruits and nuts to our market stands and other distribution channels. The site that we have chosen is the Community Training Farm, which is a partnership between the City of Kingston and Loving Spoonful, where we deliver the New Farmer Training Program. The land is owned by the federal government (Corrections Canada), and Loving Spoonful has access to it through an agreement between Corrections Canada, the City of Kingston, and Loving Spoonful. There is approximately 5,000 square feet available for use by the Community Harvest program. We plan to put in several varieties of apple, pear, paw paw, grape, currant, elderberry, chestnut, and walnut, among others, as well as “windbreak” trees such as red cedar and poplar to minimize damage from prevailing winds. The understory will have annual nitrogen fixing legumes seeded to help build the soil. An ecologically diverse food forest would help us to build local food capacity for our community, to increase our ability to withstand external food supply chain stressors (drought, extreme heat, etc.), increase our skill and knowledge sharing efforts with community, and strengthen our relationship with Loving Spoonful’s other educational programs.

We are requesting support from the LEAF grant to support materials, supplies and salaries for the development of the Community Harvest Food Forest in 2023 and early 2024.

Why is this project important to the community?

This project is important to our community for four reasons. First, by planting a food forest on municipal land, Community Harvest would build on our knowledge and skill sharing efforts. The site of this food forest would be open to the public for work days, where we invite volunteers to participate in our urban agricultural work. Community members work alongside and learn from experienced farmers using best growing practices. In October 2022, we gathered some information from community members in a survey of our volunteers. We learned that 100% of our volunteer respondents agreed that they want to learn about healthy vegetable growing practices. We also learned that we are successful in teaching gardening and food skills: 80% of volunteers reported that their involvement in Community Harvest taught them new skills. On top of engagement with volunteers, in 2022 we engaged community members from a plethora of backgrounds with tours and hands-on workshops. Working with youth from the Climate Resilience group with Pathways to Education, and adults with developmental disabilities (Extend-A-Family Kingston). We continue to create more engagement opportunities for groups such as these, each year. By building a food forest, we would be able to transfer skills and knowledge about an entirely different food system to our community, better equipping people to be able to grow these types of foods in their own yards or in their own neighbourhoods. Second, it is important to our community to receive more types of fresh, local food. In 2022, we grew 70 different crops of vegetables and herbs. By planting a food forest, we could add multiple types of fruits and nuts to our affordable markets and other distribution channels, improving upon the diets of marginalized communities who face food insecurity. In our market patron evaluation survey in October 2022, many people commented that they would like to see fruit added to our market stands. Third, Community Harvest recognizes that to further our goals of supporting ecosystems, we need to put our efforts into planting forests. For healthy ecosystems, 50% forest cover is widely recognized as necessary to protect a wide range of birds, insects, micro-organisms, and other animals who make homes in the forest. Our effort to build more multilayer forest cover would work towards mitigating climate change through carbon storage, and promotion of biodiversity- multilayer forests provide 25 times the green space (and therefore diversity of habitat) of a single layer lawn. Ecological landscape design leader Thomas Rainer explains that the paradigm shift “in horticulture over the next decade is a shift from thinking about plants as individual objects to thinking about plants as social networks - that is, communities of compatible [beings] interwoven in dense mosaics”. Fourth, adding a Community Harvest Food Forest would strengthen Loving Spoonful’s other educational programs and allow us to diversify in our community engagement. Our school-based curriculum-connected GROW Project, in partnership with the Limestone District School Board and Algonquin Lakeshore Catholic District School Board, works with over 800 elementary students each year to deliver hands-on workshops related to food systems, including field trips to our Community Harvest gardens. This new food forest would enhance their learning opportunities. Our New Farmer Training Program also operates at the Community Training Farm, where the food forest would be located. This would give our farmers-in-training the opportunity to learn about orchard management, fruit and nut production, and permaculture practices.